Effective equidistribution of twisted horocycle flows and horocycle maps

Abstract: We prove bounds for twisted ergodic averages for horocycle flows of hyperbolic surfaces, both in the compact and in the non-compact finite area case. From these bounds we derive effective equidistribution results for horocycle maps. As an application of our main theorems in the compact case we further improve on a result of A. Venkatesh, recently already improved by J. Tanis and P. Vishe, on a sparse equidistribution problem for classical horocycle flows proposed by N. Shah and G. Margulis, and in the general non-compact, finite area case we prove bounds on Fourier coefficients of cups forms which are off the best known bounds of A. Good only by a logarithmic term. Our approach is based on Sobolev estimates for solutions of the cohomological equation and on scaling of invariant distributions for twisted horocycle flows.